Children of the Night.
A woman rang me at work last week to ask if we had any bat boxes. We didn't. She asked if I knew where she might get one. I told her that for some reason, they were unusually common in the trees surrounding stately Wayne Manor.
The silence that I got in response helps explain why I've left that job.
When the conversation resumed, the woman explained (pointlessly, as I'd already said we didn't have any) that she was putting up bat boxes as bats are a key marker of ecological health. I'd already tuned out, but I think she said she was doing this because she was being told to. I can't find any news stories to support people being encouraged to do this by councils or the government, so maybe it's just her landlord insisting on it to make the property look like it’s is in an area of exceptional biodiversity.
Either way, landlord or government minister, whoever came up with this idea is an idiot.It shouldn't need to be spelled out, but bats are only a marker of biodiversity when they occur naturally. When this happens, their presence implies a lot of insects, which bats normally feed on, and a lot of insects mean a decent number of different plants and flowers.
If bats are in the area because you put up bat boxes, all that we can extrapolate from their presence is the number of bat boxes nearby. It should also go without saying that having a predatory species doesn't guarantee the prey species showing up any more than it encourages the plants the prey feeds on to grow in your area. If you want to attract gazelles onto your lawn, you don't start by buying a fucking leopard.
None of which I could be bothered to explain over the phone to a woman looking for bat boxes. Because, like I say: We didn't have any to begin with.
Unemployment has to be better than this.
Nuclear Musk.
Elon Musk has announced a couple of things in the past week, chief among them that he's an omega level douche bag.
He didn't specifically say that, but basically anything Elon Musk says comes with an overtone of "I'm an omega level douche bag." Which might be why one of the things he has told us mortals is that he's split up with Grimes, the mother of his child, Triple X WD40 3D BBQ.
This left me deeply concerned, because Musk has the demeanour of an insufferable, whiny teenager when he HAS a girlfriend. God only knows what he's going to be like now. I'd give even money on him releasing a breakup album on which he plays every instrument, badly, sometime this side of Christmas.
Then again, what might save us from that is that Elon has told people his is in favour of nuclear power. So maybe we won't live long enough to see the release of Midnight Musk.
I'm exaggerating, of course. Although Elon has a disturbing ability to influence people and trends thanks to the weird fanboys who believe that he's a self-made genius inventor (he's none of those things), I don't think Elon backing nuclear power is going to lead to any sort of nuclear boom.
Nonetheless, I wasn't too surprised to hear that Elon would be in favour of nuclear power. He's the type. The type who pretends to be influenced by the science but is at least equally influenced by his own ego and a willingness to take risks that he's personally insulated from.
First, the science. Nuclear power is astoundingly efficient. Consider that every person burns the equivalent of just over 1.5 tons of oil per year, at the moment. This is an increase on every year before, which you probably already knew because every single metric of energy consumption or climate change is always heading in whichever direction is worst. But just by going about your daily life, turning on lights and watching TV, you will personally add the equivalent of a ton and a half of burning oil to the global tally.
By contrast, if everything ran on nuclear power, the amount of waste you'd generate over the course of your entire life would be about the size of a beer can. This is obviously preferable.
Unfortunately, that beer can would melt all your skin off if you went near it, and create a mile-wide exclusion zone around your house. Which is exactly the problem.
Nuclear power is great as long as nothing ever goes wrong. A quick Google of place names like Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island proves that the number of times things have gone wrong is frighteningly above that idealised "zero" threshold. All three of those examples are, it's worth remembering, relatively minor.
Chernobyl, the worst of them, has any number of horror stories associated with it. When the local fire fighters arrived to put out a reported fire at the nuclear plant (they had no idea that it was an exposed core and horrifically dangerous) they were all so badly irradiated that the fire chief's eyes changed fucking colour. He absorbed so much radiation that something happened to him that people didn't even know was possible.1 Needless to say, every fire fighter died in horrible agony soon afterwards, and their uniforms are still too radioactive to handle thirty years later. But this was a MINOR event. It wasn't a full meltdown. It could have been a lot worse.
Except that for people like Musk, "worse" isn't really a concept. Not only will he never have to run into a burning building and absorb a fatal level of radiation for any reason, but if nuclear plants sprung up all over the world, Elon would make damn sure he never had to anywhere near them. These plants could suffer full meltdowns worse than anything we've yet seen in nuclear accidents, and Musk would see it as an acceptable risk because "acceptable" to his mind means "someone else's."
Bear this in mind when you hear that a man whose own car company can’t reliably attach a steering wheel is in favour of building nuclear plants. Musk is rich enough that consequences don’t exist.
Except in his personal life, where this weekend’s pictures have proved that Grimes is every bit as insufferable as her former paramour. She has been pictured, provocatively dressed, reading Marxist theory. Because now that she’s fabulously wealthy and has a familial link to the sometime-richest man on the planet, she’s decided that she’s going to give a shit about the poor.
Honestly, she probably only picked that outfit and book because she couldn’t find a store that sold big neon signs saying “Notice Me, Boyfriend Daddy!”
Bleugh.
Movie Review: “Free Guy.”
The fact that Ryan Reynolds has a career at all is testimony to just how likeable he is.
I'm no different to anyone else - I like Reynolds a lot, but I'd be the first to admit he's been in some utter shite. I have a high tolerance for bad movies and I still had to turn off "Six Underground," while "Blade: Trinity" might be the most painful example of a weak third movie anyone has ever created. Reynolds even came perilously close to destroying the role he was born to play when he turned up as a mute and blunted Deadpool in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."
In spite of this, he has used his boundless stores of personal charm to overcome the sometimes terrible work he is given, forging ahead and almost singlehandedly getting two good "Deadpool" films made.
All of which meant my hopes for "Free Guy" were best described as neutral. Everyone likes Reynolds, but that doesn't mean the films he's in are going to be any good. Sometimes they are. Often they're not. It might just be an okay way to kill an evening.
"Free Guy" turned out not to be good, or an okay way to kill an evening. It turned out to be so amazingly good that it's already one of my favourite films, ever.
The premise feels fun, but thin. Reynolds is a non-player character (NPC) within the chaos of a Grand Theft Auto style videogame. He doesn't think it's odd that there are constant explosions and gun battles raging around him, or that his daily routine is absolutely rigid. He thinks his life is great.
Until he meets the avatar of human gamer Jodie Comer, doing her trademark accent switching as a lethal female robber who also steals Reynolds' heart. With strange emotions awakening inside of him, Reynolds begins to realise that his reality has more to it than he'd believed.
I don't want to go too much further into it than that, and I'm trying my best to acknowledge that this is one of those films that is aimed, as Rich Hall put it, at guys my age who are me. A late-stage moment in a fight scene, for example, is so deliberately fan-servicey that it might as well have been cut from the film entirely and replaced with a free pizza coupon for anyone who knows the Konami code.
My own bias, however, can't change some salient facts. Somehow, "Free Guy" manages to have elements of "The Truman Show," except it's better. Largely because Reynolds is funnier, more likeable and a better actor than Jim Carey. It has knowing references to john Carpenter’s "They Live!", except once again, it's better. Because... well, okay, that's not necessarily too tough, but still.
It's a love story twice over and yet both of them work. That's two more love stories than most rom-coms can pull off. It's an adventure. It's a comedy. It touches on deep ideas like simulation theory, both broadly and specifically. It deals with the shiftiness of big tech firms through a computer company called Soonami - a barely disguised attack on the toxic culture at "World of Warcraft" publisher Blizzard, albeit played for laughs thanks to Taika Waititi's blowhard CEO. It also makes strong suggestions about how we-the-people should be reacting to big companies' stranglehold on our lives.
It does all of this, whilst still being effects-heavy and popcorny. It has Channing Tatum making an absolute dick of himself so brilliantly that I now have strong positive feelings about Channing Tatum, which I never knew was possible.2 The jokes are funny, the plot hangs together, the cameos (if you look them up) are surprising, and it even seems to contain fragile hope for our collective future, based around the understanding that we can shake off the assholes who rule over us in the name of greed, and build something better.
Go and watch it. And if enough of you do, I'll come back next week and absolutely put the boot into something crappy because everyone always prefers those reviews anyway. But in the meantime: "Free Guy" is incredible. Imagine if "Blade Runner" dealt with all of the same themes, except it was funny and exciting instead of just a dour, plodding exercise in good set design. That's "Free Guy."
[I saw “Free Guy” on disney plus, but it’s also out in cinemas and probably very worth seeing on a big screen. Wear a mask if you do.]
All humans have blue eyes - a lot of babies are born with them and they change colour in infancy. This is because non-blue eyes have a layer of cells that have grown over the iris, which change the pigmentation. As near as medical science can tell, fire chief Volodymyr Pravyk was exposed to so much radiation that it stripped this layer of cells off of his iris, taking them from his normal brown back to the default blue. It was hard to check as the poor bastard effectively melted from the inside out soon afterwards, and he and his men were buried in concrete coffins to protect mourners at their graves.
That’s a little harsh, as although I’d been largely blind to Tatum for years, I also really enjoyed his recent series “Comrade Detective.”